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Efficiency through biometrics

As the manufacturing landscape becomes more competitive, factory owners are looking for more innovative ways of monitoring production and, more importantly, productivity per employee. Even though time and attendance is vital in these environments, productivity monitoring is even more so.

Shop-floor data collection allows factories to measure the output per employee and compare it to their own specified benchmark to make sure the manufacturing lines are running optimally. Implementing a shop-floor data collection system also allows a real-time view of jobs in progress, as well as materials needed to finish a job.

If production is down in a certain period, the systems will be able to pinpoint production figures as well as the reason for loss of production; whether it was machine breakdown, a shortage of raw material at critical periods in the production cycle, or even employees that underperformed.

While collecting shop-floor data is not a new concept in manufacturing, using biometrics to do so is. Factories implement biometrics at every work station to stop fraud, theft of production time, tools and raw material. With biometrics, the employee takes direct responsibility for the tools they book out from the tool room for specific tasks. Employees also take responsibility for the period of time they take to finish a certain task. Time and attendance systems measure the time on the work site, but no one knows what happens between the factory gates and the production lines.

Each production job that needs to be completed is loaded into the system so employees can scan the job number via a barcode reader, proximity reader, or even reading it in manually on the biometric reader before scanning their finger to identify themselves as the one doing the job.

Each work station has a biometric terminal where all the employees in this workstation can clock on their assigned jobs. The biometric terminal needs to be able to read up to four levels of job data which include the main job number, activity of the employee, the method used to do the activity and even the raw materials and tools used in this activity.

The data collected from the biometric readers is normally collected and passed to the ERP systems that will do all the calculations needed for the factory to make certain decisions on employee productivity, employee placement and even factory layout. Because more accurate data is collected, the whole production time per item, job, or process can be measured and this refines future quoting to clients.

In addition, more stringent safety laws means that factories are now opting for biometrics in order to identify employees before they use certain equipment and tools inside the workplace. This ensures that on-duty injuries are curbed, and unauthorised staff are discouraged to use certain equipment.

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